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Today at about 19:25 UTC (2:25 PM EST), Asteroid 2012 DA14 will make its closest approach to Earth, passing a mere 27,650 kilometers above the surface — closer than our satellites in geosynchronous orbit. NASA is broadcasting a live-steam showing the asteroid from an Observatory, and will have coverage on NASA TV starting about a half-hour before closest approach. The Planetary Society will be broadcasting a live webcast, and Phil Plait will be hosting a Google+ Hangout. NASA has also compiled a nice post filled with information about the asteroid, including trajectory diagrams, animated videos of the path, and answers to question about 2012 DA14. You can also watch it move at 50x actual speed through a telescope. They take pains to note that there is no danger of the asteroid striking the planet today, or any time in the forseeable future. Its next notably close approach in 2046 will only bring it about a million kilometers away. What makes 2012 DA14 significant is that it's rather large — it's 45 meters across and weighs about 130,000 metric tons. It's also moving about 7.8 kilometers per second relative to Earth. "To view the asteroid, you will need a good pair of binoculars, or even better, a moderately powered telescope. During the closest approach, and dependant on local weather, the asteroid will be visible from parts of Europe, Africa and Asia. The asteroid will appear to be moving relatively quickly as it crosses the sky from the south to the north." NASA says this morning's meteor event in Russia was unrelated.

I don't think the reporters care all that much. I got off the phone with a reporter in Buenos Aires a minute ago, and he just hung up mid-conversation. I get the impression they aren't taking it seriously.

-OK Nathan, here's the setup. You, Morena, Jewel, Gina, and Summer are all in the ship. And someone releases a love drug. And next thing, all 5 of you are going to town.-You sure this isn't some fanboy's fantasy?-Possibly, but he's got a giant rock hanging over LA and demanding that we do this.-Well sure. I mean...*eyeing fellow cast members*...anything to save the Earth.

ID's most significant failing is that it is not falsifiable. But unfalsifiable does not equate to the notion that it never happened (nor does it mean that it did, actually).

ID's only significantly attractive feature is that it is the only hypothesis that there is even the slightest hope of, short of inventing time travel, actually ever finding scientific evidence of (eg, we discover the remains of an ancient advanced alien civilization somewhere, and are able to archeologically ascertain that life on e

Let's say for a second that intelligent design proponents are right. That you are also right in that aliens created us. This doesn't answer the underlying question: why do these aliens exist? Was it evolution or intelligent design? Repeat until you're bored to death.

This so-called "failing" of ID is equally unaccounted for in the theory of evolution, which necessitates that life itself exists in the first place.

I'm not suggesting that ID is accurate... only that, as I said, short of inventing time travel and somebody going back in time to observe it happening, it's the only hypothesis that we can probably come up with which has even the remotest hope of ever actually being validated. (Of course, what would be truly interesting is if in the process of going back in t

Proponents of ID try to use it to explain where current life came from, while ignoring the initiation of life. Since they don't believe in evolution, it makes sense to them to focus on all the myriad ways life is now... instead of the simple one way life started.

Evolution explains where current life came from, but does not explain where/how the first biological replicator formed.

Which is to say, the "so-called failing" of ID to which you refer is not the reason that anyone takes issue with ID.

Who says all ID proponents don't believe in evolution? The strongest case for ID isn't that evolution doesn't explain how life itself began, it's that we can't come up with a good justification for the alternative, which is to say "something mysterious happened", nor can we ever hope to actually say any more than this, since any efforts we might undertake to try to artificially recreate conditions in a lab, to see if life can really evolve "on its own" would ultimately be doomed to futility in this regard

That's kind of my point.. If the fact that a hypothesis doesn't explain something it was never intended to explain should not be reasonably considered a weakness in the hypothesis, then why do is to so common for people criticize ID for the same?

Because ID is a derivative of Creation, which does explain something ID does not. In fact, most people who advocate ID express that ID *does* explicitly include creation. The only time it doesn't is when religion is explicitly excluded from being allowed (government issues, schools and such). The great thing about ID is that it is 1000 different things, depending on who is using it.

For what it's worth, ID does not equate to creationism. I'm not saying this to give it any more scientific credibility... I'm saying it because ID means only what ID stands for... "intelligent design". Sure. creationism is one possible (and certainly very popular interpretation of ID, but it's not the only one.. ID is not remotely mutually exclusive to the theory of evolution.... it is only mutually exclusive to the the notion that life happened here merely by chance. And believe it or not, it's the onl

ID isn't a "how" or "what" but a "why". That makes it the same as creationism. It's like evolution without the natural selection. Unnatural selection ID being put up against natural selection evolution does make it mutually exclusive. As I said, " The great thing about ID is that it is 1000 different things, depending on who is using it.", and I never hear in these school debates where they want to include ID because it is evolution/natural selection.

ID does not attempt to remotely answer any "why"... it really only offers a hypothesis about "what". It's an alternative to the notion that life developed here entirely by chance. Nothing more, and nothing less. Creationism is entirely compatible with ID, but really, they aren't actually the same thing. ID only attempts to convey a notion of what happened to start life here, on this planet. Not elsewhere. It does not preclude the possibility that the originator of life here may have evolved elsew

Possibly... although I tend to hear that the "intelligence" in ID is supposedly God from people who detract from it *FAR* more often than I hear it from supporters of the notion.

That's because when everyone hears ID, they think "creation by God" so you don't have to say it. The proponents don't mention God so that when anyone else brings it up, they can claim strawman, but the ID proponents stick together because they all know "God" is the core.

I think a lot of scientists, when they first heard about it, were totally ready to think that this was a part of DA14. But as more evidence came in, we realized that they were basically heading in opposite directions; there's no way their orbits could be related. Really all this proves is that there's a lot of space rocks out there we haven't found.

if the loose gravitational agglomeration is large enough, it's possible for the smaller rock to pass by on the other side of the earth, swinging around and appearing to come from another direction

This isn't an issue of two objects "appearing to come from another direction." The problem is that the direction of travel of the two objects was tremendously different. In other words, they don't share the same orbit around the Sun. Notice that the Russian meteor isn't following a path anything like DA14's south to north path: http://attivissimo.blogspot.com/2013/02/russian-meteor-path-plotted-in-google.html [blogspot.com].

No... if that meteorite was in an orbit 30,000km radius from DA14 (which it would have to have been in order to hit Russia when it did), its orbital velocity would necessarily have to be very low. As in, so slow it would take millenia to complete even one orbit. Since DA14 is moving at a whopping 30km/second relative to Earth, anything orbiting it that far out would be moving in virtually the same direction and speed with respect to us.

The object that entered over Russia was not "large", at least not in the sense 2012 DA14 is.

If they were related there would likely be many more entry events before and after 2012 DA14.

And the coincidence is not nearly as improbably as you suggest, the Earth suffers many entry events each day of varying sizes. This was a bit bigger than most, but certainly not unheard of. The most unusual thing about it is that it was captured on video.

the tunguska event in 1908, ironically also over siberia, is the last time we had something as large or larger, a century ago

Citation needed. The Tunguska event came from an object on the order of 100 meters in diameter (http://web.utk.edu/~comet/papers/nature/TUNGUSKA.html). The early estimate I saw from NASA of today's meteor's diameter was 10 meters in diameter. That's a 1000x difference in volume, making your comparison pretty extreme.

Sorry, you're simply not correct. Tunguska released energy equivalent to 10 - 20 Megatons (very rough estimate) and flattened over 2,000sq KM for forest. Thousands would be *dead* if this was even remotely that scale of event, not merely cut with shards of glass.

Events of the size seen today happen roughly every 10 years or so, maybe more since if they happen over the ocean we might not detect it at all and until recently always-on video recording devices have been pretty rare.

While your theory makes sense, I would hope the experts also took into consideration things such as speed and direction of travel. Even more could be told if/when fragments are found. The type of meteorite can be determined and see if it is a close match for what DA14 is expected to be, and certain geological signs can tell its history, and possibly even the speed of entry (frictional heating can cause various chemical reactions, all leaving their mark).

Sorry, just picked up Skyrim again after almost a year. But, if your point is that at one point in time, very far off, these two 'hunks of rock' may have been attached then I suppose you're correct. I mean, if the Big Bang was an explosion of matter in space (at one point in time), these hunks of rock may have been very close to the matter that makes up yours or my body at one point. However, I'll trust NASA if they say that for our purposes,

So dead satellites and broken satellite parts as a result of micrometeor impacts are among the flotsam, and the orbiting boosters and other debris are jetsam. I don't see why the phrase doesn't apply here.

Over 300,000 watching the live feed from Ustream right now. Come on Slashdot, we can break 'em!

On another note, it's funny that the asteroid shows as a streak on camera. Most of astronomy is about long exposures, so the camera at the Gingin Observatory apparently isn't very fast at all. This particular event is radically faster than most of what astronomy observes. If the watching of large rocks becomes a world-wide pastime, observatories are going to start wanting budgets to add a high speed camera.

This asteroid won't do squat. Even if it was coming directly at us. Seriously. Don't panic, don't freak out, don't lose any sleep over a 45m asteroid barreling towards earth at a "break-neck" 7.8 km/s. If someone is screaming "THE END IS NIGH!!! THE ASTEROID WILL KILL US ALL!!!!" point at them and laugh in their face.

The following is backed by SCIENCE:https://www.purdue.edu/impactearth

If we assume that the asteroid is made of pure freaking iron, comes in head on, is moving at 11 km/s, smacks into crystallin

I'd be interested to know if anyone can spot something that would make this simulation invalid in the case of 2012 DA14. I just searched through and copy-pasted excerpts containing the word assumption for effect, but have no idea how important any of these are:

While some religious nuts are over-playing this, you are seriously under-playing it. We would not "all die", but you would certainly not want to be standing 1 km from the [projected] impact point. It would be like a 1-2 Megaton bomb going off more-or-less over your head (from the Purdue link - which I ran and found the results rather ambiguous btw). The Hiroshima bomb (also an air blast) was only about 1% of that energy and took out the centre of a city to a radius of about 2 km.

I hope the mainstream media gives more attention to this instead of some celebrity bullshit. People might start gaining an interest in this stuff and maybe give this subject matter the attention it deserves.

Not that I'm hoping that it squishes innocent people or anything. I was just thinking that an impact with an object of DA14's size could be a great way to get some funding back into the sciences. All without that pesky nuclear winter that a more Apophis sized object would bring. Maybe a collision could give mankind a common enemy.... SPACE!